Welcome to Tech Refresh with Kim Commando and friends from Commando.com with a K.

That's K-O-M-A-N-D-O.

Hey, before we get started really quick, we'd love it if you'd hit the subscribe button so you get these podcasts delivered every week.

And scams are hitting military families hard, but they're not the only ones.

We'll have that story a little bit later.

Also, Ben was not here last week, so we went camping and we've got some tech stuff that you're going to absolutely love on Ben's product review this week.

Hey, Kim is at the hospital with her mom again today, unfortunately.

We wish them both the very best,

and our thoughts and prayers are with them. But for now, we start with the news. So Twitter gave

blue checkmark verification to a bunch of fake accounts. What's that all about, Ben? Well,

the blue checkmark, that's the badge that you've been verified on social media sites like

Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

But even public figures aren't guaranteed the checkmark.

And they're pretty much an impossible, you know, kind of status symbol if you have a basic user account.

And after a four-year break, Twitter finally started accepting applications for the checkmark again back in May.

But this week, they had to take back

the symbol granted only to a chosen few because they were for fake accounts.

Womp, womp, yeah. It's six accounts, all created on the same day in mid-June with the same

followers, no tweets. Yeah, that's not suspicious, right? The best part, one of these verified accounts

was for a cat called Anne LaMislar. A cat, yeah. It just said the official Twitter account for

Anne Lammislar. Wasn't even grumpy cat or something. Yeah, no, just, I mean, it's this cute

kitten, I guess, but yeah, it turns out this handful of accounts was part of some malicious group of over a thousand accounts making up this whole spam botnet.

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